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Today, the new Three Investigators series moves to a once-a-month publication schedule. On the 3rd of each month between now and March 3, 2027, a new book will be published shortly after midnight eastern US time. Today’s the day for The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone – which is now up and running as an e-book, a paperback, and a hardcover – and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. (There may be a brief delay with the non-e-book versions on Barnes & Noble, but Amazon is fully up and running.) The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone opens a new chapter in the boys’ lives. It’s the start of summer after their first year in high school, and with it comes a new rhythm, a new setting, and the first official appearance of Mallory MacLeod as their Special Consultant. The case begins when Uncle Titus brings back a curious grindstone from the Napa Valley, engraved with the dates of Galileo Galilei’s birth and death. A historical oddity, perhaps – or the beginning of a far older puzzle. Before long, the team finds itself deciphering pigpen ciphers, following Masonic symbols, and navigating a so-called “calendar house” with strange ties to the Illuminati. There are monks. There are secrets. And there are brown robes where brown robes shouldn't be. This was actually quite a tough story to plot, but once plotted, it seemed to have an inevitability about it that gave it a truly classic Three Investigators climax. This is mostly Bob's story, but Pete really shines in the crucial moments, and Jupiter is totally himself in the moments when it really counts. I won’t spoil the ending—but I will say this: this story has one of my favorite settings in the series so far. The calendar house where much of the action takes place was inspired by a calendar house Steven and I visited in the Orkney Islands, and I think we used its inspiration to good effect. It certainly brings The Three Investigators face to face with a mystery that takes them into the right kind of danger for them to solve the case. I truly thank you guys for all the support you’ve given me since this account first went up. With this new book - and the start of the second season - the series is well and truly launched, and even if you haven’t had time yet to read all six of the books that preceded it, I highly recommend that you check out this one. The story arc for the series isn’t so tight that you can’t read a book out of order if you feel like it! The link will follow in a second post. BOOK DESCRIPTION FOR THE MYSTERY OF THE GALILEAN GRINDSTONE “In the seventh book of a 26-book story arc, the summer is beginning with an unusual challenge for The Three Investigators. At the end of the previous summer, Jupiter invited their new friend Mallory MacLeod to join the team as a Special Consultant. She's also been helping out at the Salvage Yard, so she, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob are all present when Uncle Titus returns from the Napa Valley with an intriguing artifact – a curious sandstone wheel. The wheel appears to be a grindstone, engraved with the birth and death dates of Galileo Galilei, the brilliant Italian inventor and astronomer with ties to the powerful Medici family. When Uncle Titus suggests the wheel could be connected to rumors of a hidden treasure, the team quickly shifts gears to investigate. They travel to the old Victorian "calendar house" where the wheel was found – a hotel owned by Portuguese immigrants who are unaware of the house's mysterious past. As it turns out, both the house and a nearby Franciscan monastery are brimming with Masonic symbols. The boys soon find themselves counting doors, rooms, and panes of glass, and deciphering cryptic letters in pigpen cipher that date back to 1890. When Mallory joins them and uncovers the startling connection between an ancient organization, the Illuminati, and the Masonic Order, the case takes on an added urgency. But the puzzle isn't adding up. Is the Italian stonemason, Clemente DeLuca, as innocent as he seems? Could the man writing a book about calendar houses be hiding his true intentions? Are the brown cotton robes the monks wear acting as a disguise for one of them? Locked inside the Tower Room, the team must work together to solve the mystery before it's too late. But the villains are closing in on the calendar house's secret – and they won't stop until it's theirs! Join Jupiter, Pete, Bob, and Mallory as they decode centuries-old secrets, face dangerous enemies, and reveal a long-hidden treasure in this intense new chapter of The Three Investigators series. Fans old and new will love its classic feel.”

Today, the new Three Investigators series moves to a once-a-month publication schedule. On the 3rd of each month between now and March 3, 2027, a new book will be published shortly after midnight eastern US time. Today’s the day for The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone – which is now up and running as an e-book, a paperback, and a hardcover – and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. (There may be a brief delay with the non-e-book versions on Barnes & Noble, but Amazon is fully up and running.) The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone opens a new chapter in the boys’ lives. It’s the start of summer after their first year in high school, and with it comes a new rhythm, a new setting, and the first official appearance of Mallory MacLeod as their Special Consultant. The case begins when Uncle Titus brings back a curious grindstone from the Napa Valley, engraved with the dates of Galileo Galilei’s birth and death. A historical oddity, perhaps – or the beginning of a far older puzzle. Before long, the team finds itself deciphering pigpen ciphers, following Masonic symbols, and navigating a so-called “calendar house” with strange ties to the Illuminati. There are monks. There are secrets. And there are brown robes where brown robes shouldn't be. This was actually quite a tough story to plot, but once plotted, it seemed to have an inevitability about it that gave it a truly classic Three Investigators climax. This is mostly Bob's story, but Pete really shines in the crucial moments, and Jupiter is totally himself in the moments when it really counts. I won’t spoil the ending—but I will say this: this story has one of my favorite settings in the series so far. The calendar house where much of the action takes place was inspired by a calendar house Steven and I visited in the Orkney Islands, and I think we used its inspiration to good effect. It certainly brings The Three Investigators face to face with a mystery that takes them into the right kind of danger for them to solve the case. I truly thank you guys for all the support you’ve given me since this account first went up. With this new book - and the start of the second season - the series is well and truly launched, and even if you haven’t had time yet to read all six of the books that preceded it, I highly recommend that you check out this one. The story arc for the series isn’t so tight that you can’t read a book out of order if you feel like it! The link will follow in a second post. BOOK DESCRIPTION FOR THE MYSTERY OF THE GALILEAN GRINDSTONE “In the seventh book of a 26-book story arc, the summer is beginning with an unusual challenge for The Three Investigators. At the end of the previous summer, Jupiter invited their new friend Mallory MacLeod to join the team as a Special Consultant. She's also been helping out at the Salvage Yard, so she, Jupiter, Pete, and Bob are all present when Uncle Titus returns from the Napa Valley with an intriguing artifact – a curious sandstone wheel. The wheel appears to be a grindstone, engraved with the birth and death dates of Galileo Galilei, the brilliant Italian inventor and astronomer with ties to the powerful Medici family. When Uncle Titus suggests the wheel could be connected to rumors of a hidden treasure, the team quickly shifts gears to investigate. They travel to the old Victorian "calendar house" where the wheel was found – a hotel owned by Portuguese immigrants who are unaware of the house's mysterious past. As it turns out, both the house and a nearby Franciscan monastery are brimming with Masonic symbols. The boys soon find themselves counting doors, rooms, and panes of glass, and deciphering cryptic letters in pigpen cipher that date back to 1890. When Mallory joins them and uncovers the startling connection between an ancient organization, the Illuminati, and the Masonic Order, the case takes on an added urgency. But the puzzle isn't adding up. Is the Italian stonemason, Clemente DeLuca, as innocent as he seems? Could the man writing a book about calendar houses be hiding his true intentions? Are the brown cotton robes the monks wear acting as a disguise for one of them? Locked inside the Tower Room, the team must work together to solve the mystery before it's too late. But the villains are closing in on the calendar house's secret – and they won't stop until it's theirs! Join Jupiter, Pete, Bob, and Mallory as they decode centuries-old secrets, face dangerous enemies, and reveal a long-hidden treasure in this intense new chapter of The Three Investigators series. Fans old and new will love its classic feel.”

This is a reminder that starting in just ten days, things will be changing in the way the new Three Investigators series is published. As of September 3rd – with the publication of The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone – Steven and I will moving to a one-book-a-month publication schedule. Although three-books-at-a-time, every three months, seemed like a good idea when Steven and I were just launching the series, it now seems a better idea to have a straightforward one-month interval between each new novel. As well, though it originally seemed a good idea for me to try to give readers a sense of each new book by posting a sample of it on both The Salvage Yard and this X account, it now seems better to let Amazon and Barnes & Noble handle the business of samples, and for me to do something else instead. What I plan to do is simply write a personal post on the 3rd of every month, reminding you that a new book is now available, and telling you a bit about it, from my personal perspective. Although the e-books will automatically go into pre-sale about three and a half weeks before the pub date, because the paperbacks and hardcovers will only become available on the official pub date, I think it makes sense to write a single post on the day you'll first be able to order the new book in any form you like. I’ll keep the posts short, but still give you a more personal take on each book than you can get from a book description. I’ll outline the plot of the book in a different way than the book description does, and make a few comments about how the boys and Mallory approached the case this time. But I’ll also try to tell you something about how each book got written – what or who inspired the plot, and maybe when and how. As I suggested up above, I won’t be sending out a separate post to let you know when each new e-book has gone into pre-sale, but, in future, anyone interested in securing an e-book early should find them up and running by the 6th or 7th of the month before the month in which the book will be officially published. Right now, if you want to order The Mystery of the Galilean Grindstone as an e-book, you can find the book in pre-sale on either KDP or Barnes & Noble. Just use the series links to find it. Hope you’re all enjoying the end of summer. See you again on September 3rd!

Most of you know that three brand-new Three Investigators books are set to be released on June 3rd. But I suspect that not all of you are aware that, from here on out, the future reach of the new series rests largely in your hands and the hands of other readers like you. (I know that those of you who subscribe to my Substack have already received a post making the same observations that this one does, but for those who *don’t* subscribe, I want to copy most of the post here.) I can’t remember whether I’ve ever actually mentioned that the main reason Steven and I decided to publish the new books ourselves was because we knew that if we went to a legacy publisher, we’d lose creative control of important aspects of the new series. However, another, secondary, reason was because no such publisher would have committed to a 26-book series in advance. Such publishers no longer have true creative control themselves. They are now uniformly owned by global corporations. In fact, the publishing world has changed almost beyond recognition in the time since my father sat down at his writing table and created Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews by pecking words out on his old Underwood typewriter. Given all the changes I have seen in my lifetime in the way books are marketed, I decided a long time ago that I would never put Jupiter, Pete, and Bob into the hands of people who merely wanted to make money off them, or who didn’t understand their essential goodness and the essential goodness of the world they inhabited. In fact, I’ve known since I became an adult that I had a moral responsibility to try to protect my father’s fictional sons from exploitation by a too-commercial world. What I didn’t know until much later in my life was that I would eventually come to feel that I should personally oversee the creation of a new Three Investigators series for a new generation of American young people. Many American boys are in a terrible place right now - vilified by their own culture, disaffected, and increasingly isolated. While there’s a lot of good YA fantasy being written these days, these boys live in the real world, and I conceived of the new books as a way to reach (and hopefully help) this potential audience by showing them the real world not only as it might be, or could be, but surely should be. I wanted the new series to teach them the same things the classic one taught several previous generations - to think critically and follow the evidence - but also to show them the enduring value of friendship, to present them with teenage role models they could emulate, to remind them that we are all just a tiny bead on the pearly string of history, and to illuminate the importance of older mentors. Steven suspended his very successful editing business for six-and-a-half years to work on the new series, and I stopped writing my own books for the same amount of time so that I could lay out the trajectory for, plot, and then co-write 26 new Three Investigators books. In so doing, I used all the skills I had developed in over forty years as a writer for adults to try to give something valuable to a new generation of young people. But since I am who I am, in order to use those skills to good effect I needed to write the books for a slightly older audience than the one which had read the original books. I needed to use a more complex point of view, and to develop both theme and metaphor in a way that my father hadn’t. I did this first and foremost in order to ensure that I’d stay interested enough in the project, as a writer, to stick with it for as long as it might take, but I also felt that the approach I had in mind would provide something unique to today’s potential readers. Because I’d read again and again that the current generation of boys was reading very little - if any - fiction these days, I also felt convinced that if I could get their attention at all, it would be through adding something novel to the mystery, adventure, and puzzle-solving aspects of the classic series. That something became delving deeper into the Three Investigators’ backgrounds and characters, and taking on broader themes and more challenging subject matter. Since fantasy tends to draw pretty sharp distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys, I also wanted to give young people a visceral way to understand the endless real-world gradations of good vs. bad, true vs. false, and excellent vs. mediocre. It seems to me vitally important that today’s young people be exposed to such complexities in fiction, since they certainly aren’t being exposed to them in their encounters with the mainstream media. It was wonderful being able to follow my instincts, unimpeded by any outside interference, and it was great to know I could confidently plan a 26-book story arc. But by choosing to publish the books ourselves, Steven and I landed ourselves in a publishing and reviewing system very different from the one we had long been familiar with. And although in the end I loved the writing experience from start to finish, both the overall conception and the specific stories were complicated enough so that at times it was hard to believe that Steven and I would ever get the series finished. What kept the two of us going for six-and-a half years was the knowledge that we were doing something really cool - and if you keep reading the new books as they are published, I think you’ll be able to see how unusual and compelling the series as a whole actually is. However, at this point in time, I am desperate to get back to my own writing, and to put the publication of the new Three Investigators series on some kind of automatic pilot. Luckily, all the books are totally written, all the book covers are finished, and Steven and I have reason to think that we’ve completed most of the steep learning curve that was required when we decided to publish the books ourselves. I hope you’ll be willing to help us prove that Steven and I made the right decision when it came to the way we approached both the writing and the publication of this series by doing everything you can to help get the new books into the hands of young people. If you know teachers or school administrators or homeschooling parents who might be interested in using the new books in their classes, schools, or home classrooms, please make them aware of the books’ existence. If you know young people in your extended family or your neighborhood who you think might like them, please consider giving the books to them as a gift. If you know a blogger or a tweeter who might be willing to give the series a positive mention on social media somewhere, please ask them to do it. And if you are inclined to give these books a five-star rating on Amazon, please consider adding a brief review to your rating - one which mentions young readers. (If you can’t bring yourself to write even a very brief review, please register the rating, anyway!) The fact is, at the current moment, both the subscribers to my Substack and the followers to this X account are adults who grew up on the classic series. And while, of course, I’m delighted that the new books seem to be appealing to people who have known about The Three Investigators for a long time now, I also want the books to get the chance to appeal to people who’ll be encountering Jupiter, Pete, and Bob for the very first time. With that in mind, Steven and I have decided to start publishing the series through IngramSpark, in addition to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. IngramSpark is a mainstream book distributor which will list them in catalogues available to booksellers and librarians. From now on, new books will be published through IngramSpark within a month of their publication on Amazon, and at that point, it will also be possible for you to mention the series to the manager or the head librarian the next time you’re in your favorite bookstore or library. Finally - and just so you know - starting in September, rather than publishing three books every three months, Steven and I are going to be moving to a one-book-a-month publication schedule. Our main motive in doing that will be to regularize our own lives in the eighteen months that will follow September 3rd - but as book readers ourselves from way back, we kinda like the idea of a book a month, anyway. Under the new system, we won’t be putting the e-books into pre-sale, but on the 3rd of each month - once a book is available on Amazon as an e-book, a paperback, and a hardcover - I’ll be sending out the complete first chapter to all subscribers on my Substack. (A few days before that, I’ll send out a reminder about the upcoming release in the form of the book description and dust jacket, which will posted both to my Substack and also this X account.) I’m hoping that regularizing the future publication of both social media posts and the new Three Investigators books will be good for everyone involved. Many thanks in advance for any help you can give the new books as they make their way into the world. (The pinned post on The Three Investigators home page has a link to the series page on Amazon, for those of you who may need it, and the link to my Substack is just above it.) The photograph at the end of this post is of me, at the age of sixteen, standing under a tree in a field. It’s amazing how completely you can’t guess what lies ahead in life when you’re still a teenager!

The first 3 books in the new T3I series are out at last, and I’ll reply to this with a link to the Amazon series page. If you want to read excerpts of Book 1 at once, just go to The Salvage Yard on you-know-where and look for the latest post. Please re-post this if you see it! For non-American readers, Grok tells me that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble will ship physical books purchased on their American websites to addresses in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Spain, France, Denmark, and indeed, just about any country on the planet – with a few exceptions like North Korea, and some logistically tricky spots. The costs for shipping will be higher than they would be with a ship-to address in the United States, and (depending on the country), the books may need to pass through customs, but Grok insists that just about anyone reading these words who wants a physical copy of one of the new books should have little trouble getting it. I hope that’s true, but if it *isn’t* true in some particular place, or at some particular moment, please be patient. Steven and I are working as hard as we can to get things sorted.